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At my outset I did not only declare, that the destruction of civil society was the object of their views; I did not confine myself to saying, that should Jacobinism triumph every Religion and every Government would be overthrown; but I added, that to whatever rank in society you may belong, your riches and your fields, your houses and your cottages, even your very wives and children would be torn from you21 I also rejected fanaticism and enthusiasm in my own and my reader’s name. I have said it, and adopting the simplest construction, do not proofs of the most extensive plots croud upon us from the very lessons of the Sect? Can common sense, nay can the strongest prejudice, refuse to admit such powerful evidence?

Let him who may wish to preserve his field, his house, or the smallest part of his property, under this patriarchal life, go back to the lesser Mysteries; there let him hear the Hierophant teaching the adept, that it would have been happy for man, “Had he know how to preserve himself in the primitive state in which nature had placed him!—But soon the unhappy germ developed itself in his heart, and rest and happiness disappeared. As families multiplied, the necessary means of subsistence began to fail. The Nomade or roaming life ceased; Property began; Men chose fixed habitations; Agriculture brought them together.” What were in the eyes of the Sect the dreadful consequences of this deviation from the Nomade or Patriarchal life?—Why the Hierophant hastens to tell us, Liberty was ruined in its foundations, and Equality disappeared. This Patriarchal or Nomade life is then no other than that which preceded property, the building of fixed habitations, of houses, cottages, or the cultivation of your fields. It was this beginning of property therefore, the building of habitations, the cultivation of lands, which struck the first mortal blow at Equality and Liberty. Should any one wish to return to the Patriarchal or Nomade life with such wretches as these apostles of Equality and Liberty, let him begin by renouncing his property; let him abandon his house and his field; let him, in unison with the Sect, declare, that the first blasphemy which was uttered against Equality and Liberty was by the man who first said my field, my house, my property.

It must be voluntary blindness, indeed, in the man who will not see the hatred conceived and the Conspiracies entered into by the Sect against titles or pretensions to, nay against the very existence of property. It will acknowledge none, nor can it in any shape be compatible with their explanations of Equality and Liberty, or with that primitive state of nature which no more entitles you or me to the possession of this gold or silver, or that field, than it does a third person.

Here it is not simply the question of establishing the Agrarian Laws, where lands, riches, and other properties are to be equally distributed among all; it is not simply to abolish the distinction of rich and poor; no, every property is to be destroyed, that of the poor like that of the rich. The first man who was weary of the Nomade, roaming, vagabond, and savage life, built a cot and not a palace. The first who furrowed the earth was in quest of bread and not of

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gold; but he nevertheless, according to the principles of the Sect, was the man who struck the first deadly blow at Equality and Liberty. Poor or rich man then, according to the doctrine of the Sect, the field you have recovered from the waste, and that you have cultivated, belongs to me equally as to you, or else to nobody; I, though idle, and inactive, am entitled to the fruit of your labours; I have a right to share those fruits which you have raised on the land which I left uncultured. Does not Equality disappear, whether it be a poor or rich man who shall pretend to be entitled to or say this field is mind, I have that property? If the poor man has a title to his property, has not the rich man also one? Treasures and palaces are no more property than the cot or cottage. Here an Illuminee spies want, there abundance; Equality and Liberty are every where banished; Despotism or Slavery is universal. Nevertheless, Equality and Liberty in his eyes are the rights of Nature, and he beholds them mortally wounded on the first appearance of property, when man became stationary. Poor or rich, you all imbrued your hands in this foul assassination of Equality and Liberty when you pretended to property; from that instant you are both involved in the curse pronounced in the mysteries; you are both objects of the Conspiracies of the Sect from the first instant that you dared assert your right to your habitations whether cots or palaces, to your properties whether fields or domains. But these cannot be the whole of the secrets; they are only those of the lesser mysteries. Weishaupt has revealed them to his Epopts; he reserves the grander secrets for his Mage and Man-King; then let any man rich or poor harbour, if he can, a hope of seeing the Sect respect his property. Or rather, let him behold the Sect at present pillaging the rich in favour of the poor. The last mysteries or ultimate conspiracy will take place; and then the poor man will learn, that if Illuminism begins by pillaging the rich, it is only to teach him that he is no better entitled to his property than the rich man was, and that the time is near when he will also be pillaged and fall a victim to the curse which has been pronounced against every proprietor.

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